It’s more than 2 years since I first started thinking about rockbands in relation to companies. It started out with a simple blogpost on my company blog entitled: Toothless Tiger is not a business anymore – it’s a rockband

I am a person who has always had a childhood dream of playing in a band. The attention, the stardom but mostly the creativity (I know I might have a very glorified views on rockbands – but hear me out). I have always been craving creativity and freedom. My deceased grandfather always told me that I did what I pleased – and that would be my way forward, because it was a strong urge in me – the rebellion. The anarchy. The strong urge to change the game and make it better.

A half a year after I wrote that blogpost, I had thought enough about it to talk about it at a tech conference in Lissabon, Portugal. After that came the E-book entitled why every company should be a rockband, my use of the term rockbandism again and again and again.

In essense a company should become a rockband and practice rockbandism because it makes them cool and popular. Maybe not to all of the world, but to the people who likes hear the music they play. Some of these people will even like it so much, that they become fans or even groupies. It’s a steep road uphill to rockbandism stardom – but it is so much easier to get people to relate to what you’re doing because of the buzzword of the last couple of years: social media. Social media has gained so much momentum because it promises us something that we haven’t had before in our business life – a way to go back to basics of sales, PR and marketing and develop real deep trusted relations with the people who are interested in us and think we are cool. As I see it social media can do one thing for you and one thing only: it can bring you closer to your surroundings. Be it people, companies, suppliers, competitors, it doesn’t matter – it’s what we put in this social media space that defines who we are, what we care about, and how we approach people. It gives us a voice and it makes us speak directly to people – if we decide to use it at all.

Every company should be a rockband because it gives meaning to the things we do, it provides a structure in our coolness and it makes us act from gig to gig – or initiative to initiative.. Every company should be a rockband because it defines us as good companies who cares for the world and the audience. Oh and if you’re not that into rockbands, you can choose to be something else – just choose something that other people can relate to and other people think rocks. Because it’s all about rock n’roll within your own field or industry or whatever.

Rock on.